Blog Post

Facebook wants you to take its social network to the office

For many people, LinkedIn is the social network of choice for business uses — finding employees or jobs, researching companies — and Facebook is for the fun stuff — sharing vacation photos, talking trash and obsessive Scrabble playing.

But [company]Facebook[/company] wants to change that dynamic, according to this FT.com story. According to the report, Facebook for Work, which is now in the pilot stage, will:

allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, competing with [company]Google[/company] Drive and [company]Microsoft[/company] Office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The usual Facebook newsfeeds, streamed messages and groups will remain a key part of the offering but — this is important — users’ work accounts will be cordoned off from their personal profile with all the drunken party pix, sports and political diatribes that might entail.

Hmmm. what could possibly go wrong here?

TechCrunch first reported on the project in June, saying much of the development work on the project was taking place in London and Dublin.

Facebook had no comment for this story.

For Facebook, which claims north of 1.3 billion users worldwide and its quest for revenue, this move makes sense. It also illustrates the further eroding of the line between consumer and work technologies that has roiled the IT market.

I’m not sure, however, that the availability of a Facebook for Work will change many habits or woo Google Drive, Microsoft Office/OneDrive users, or [company]LinkedIn[/company] users.

Old habits die hard. Do you really want your work stuff on the “fun” social network?

And why would anyone want to give Facebook yet more information for their dossier on you? The value of capturing one’s professional preferences, behaviour and content usage is considerable, and when added to one’s “fun” data file, it gives FB a scary depth of knowledge about individual users that is unparalleled in human history.

I was an early proponent of using LinkedIn as a sort of blog. I immediately began to use the ability to post to Twitter when the feature was released. LikedIn is quite good at enabling such posting. The companyâ€™s apps are horrible and search functionality for information is lacking sorely. But, I would like to see competition in this space. LinkedIn has not significantly updated or expanded the tools I use on a daily basis. I can only imagine that Facebook will pay close attention to professional products.